Joan Wickersham was born in New York City and grew up there and in Connecticut. She is the author of The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt 2008), a National Book Award Finalist. Her first novel, The Paper Anniversary, was published by Viking.
Her fiction has appeared in magazines including Agni, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and has also been published in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. She has published essays and reviews in Glamour, Yankee, The Los Angeles Times, and The International Herald Tribune; and her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe. She has contributed and read on-air essays for National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition.” She also writes frequently about architecture, including “The Lurker,” a column she created for Architecture Boston magazine.
Topics
“When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying ‘I’m gone, and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.’”
On a winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Who was he? Why did he do it? And who was she now? Joan Wickersham has chosen the index format -- that most formal and objective of structures -- to impose order on this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. The form mirrors the mind’s attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Every bit of family history, every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of the elusive truth.
Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and a deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father
570.842.3300All Rights Reserved